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been so good, I have clipped and saved them. Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts from obituaries that appeared in the Gazette.

"R. was an avid reader and as a young adult would climb into the unheated attic under the dim light of a single bulb and would read the Bible, several chapters at a time, until he reached the last cover."

"She gained notoriety for loading an old shopping cart with children's books and ambulating through the poor sections of town reading books to underprivileged children...Also during this period...books disappeared from the public library never to be seen again..."

Even though I played basketball and ran cross country in high school, I rarely read the sports section. The same is true of the comics. When I was a kid, we lived close enough to our elementary school so that two of my brothers and I were able to go home for lunch. Our newspaper had a full page of comics and a partial page of comics. The first one home got the full page, the second one the partial page, and the last one, of course, had to just wait patiently for the other two to finish.

I was disappointed when Gary Larson stopped doing The Far Side because that was one comic I did read regularly. Mother Goose And Grimm and Lio sometimes fill the bill, but they are not quite the same. But if the comics don't make me laugh, Annie's Mailbox often does. We take ourselves so seriously, but letters to Annie reveal what a flawed species we are.

I quit watching television news a long time ago. The amount of material in thirty minutes of television news would only fill a page or two of the newspaper. Each day's newspaper, however, is the equivalent of a short book. The quantity and variety in a newspaper are just two of the advantages it has over its competitors.

A television broadcast is also linear. You have to sit through everything, including commercials, to view what you want. With a newspaper, you can pick and choose what you want to read. In that respect, a newspaper is more like the internet than any other medium.

A friend of mine told me recently that she got rid of her cable and her newspaper as cost cutting measures. I got rid of cable a long time ago. Cutting my expenses was only one reason. But I will never get rid of the newspaper. If I were ever that pressed for money, I'd get rid of my morning coffee first.

Learn more about this author, Dan Weaver.
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